OVERKILL: Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Robinson Cano (left to right) wear Jackie Robinson's uniform number on Thursday night. A better way to honor Robinson would be if every first baseman wore his number, because that's the position he played in his major league debut.Reuters

Every April 15 it’s now the same — taxes and Jackie Robinson. Every major league player, manager and coach is issued a No. 42 uniform, Robinson’s uniform number, to commemorate him on the anniversary of his big league debut on April 15, 1947.

And that multiplies to roughly 900 No. 42 jerseys — 899 if you factor in the one Mariano Rivera already wears.

And that’s ludicrous, a case of mindlessly excessive grandstanding and a colossal waste of money in Robinson’s name and his significance in history.

Robinson debuted as a starter at first base. So then, why not have only the starting first basemen wear No. 42, which would lend itself to both historical context while allowing something useful to be done with the tens of thousands of dollars otherwise annually spent on hundreds of one-day-only No. 42 major league uniforms?

Call me crazy, but why not donate that savings to, say, building a two or three youth baseball fields in urban neighborhoods and/or to college scholarships in Robinson’s name? Wanna show off? Understood. Then make an annual all-games pregame ceremony of the donations.

Unless, of course, MLB would be more eager to announce how much is spent, every April 15, to outfit everyone — even those who sit the entire game with their backs to the walls of the dugouts or bullpens — in No. 42 jerseys.

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Unless they make sense, good deeds become empty deeds. NCAA women’s basketball teams wear pink uniforms to acknowledge Breast Cancer Awareness Week. But if the players simply wore pink head and hair bands and the NCAA saw to it that the money that would have been spent on pink uniforms was donated to breast cancer research, bingo, we have a winner.

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Curt Schilling was admired for his devotion to his late father. So devoted was he, the TV folks would gush, that he would buy a seat for his departed dad at every game he started, a seat that must remain empty.

We were told that Schilling’s gesture is a very, very nice thing. To me, though, it seemed like a waste of a ticket that someone worthy of a free ticket — and someone invited as Schilling’s guest and in his father’s name — could have used.

Doggin’ it not O-Kay

Either a player runs reasonably hard after he hits one deep or he doesn’t. But there is no good excuse for easing into a home run trot until the batter knows for sure that it’s a home run. And there’s no good excuse for a batter who recognizes, too late, that he was wrong.

Last week David Wright was excused by the Mets’ SNY trio for home-run trotting a ball that would smack off the wall. They excused Wright on the nonsensical grounds that they, too, thought it was gone.

Thursday, Yankees outfielder Marcus Thames went into his homer jog after smashing one to deep left-center. When the ball hit off the base of the wall, Thames had to shift into fourth to make second. On Channel 9, Michael Kay noted that Thames thought he hit it out, but lost track of it, thus, he concluded, “I don’t think that was a lack of hustle.”

OK, then, what was it? What does Kay call it when a player doesn’t run all the way on a ball that hits off the wall?

Thames apparently disagreed with Kay. He was seen standing on second, a self-critical expression on his face while smacking himself on top of his batting helmet to indicate that he had done wrong. He seemed pretty eager to let everyone know that he had been guilty of a lack of hustle.

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Is there again no one on Yankees or Mets telecasts to tell us why all those great seats behind the backstop are, for a second straight season in two new ballparks, empty?

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Baseball In The Age of Bud Selig: Take a guess, which lasted longer, February’s Super Bowl — Saints 31, Colts 17, including a protracted halftime show starring The Who?